Changes slated for utility bills

Changes slated for utility bills

Utility customers could soon be seeing changes to their bills — including temporary increases — with a new billing system being proposed by City of Bartlesville officials.

The City Council is expected to discuss the steps to move to cycle billing during a 7 p.m. meeting Tuesday.

Council approval is not needed for plans to proceed but city staff members would like input from councilors on the proposed changes, City Manager Ed Gordon said Friday.

Before the recent switch to an automatic meter reading system, the city was billing for utilities in arrears — between seven and 30 days. Billing in arrears has continued as city officials worked toward transitioning to billing for current usage, Gordon said.

“This will be done gradually during cycle billing implementation by adding a few days usage to each month’s bill until all of the unbilled usage is caught up,” Administrative Director/CFO Mike Bailey said in a memorandum to Gordon.

Gordon said city officials have worked on steps to avoid causing hardships for customers during the transition.

“Because we’ve been reading a month behind, now the citizens are going to get what appears to be a double bill. So we’re trying to figure out a way to soften that and give options to the City Council and kind of get some input from them and then move forward with it,” he said. “We’re looking to inform council that we’re going to start tightening up the billing and we’re looking at a couple of ways to do that and we just want to talk to council about it.”

Gordon said city officials have looked at adding three billed days each month to billing statements over a 10-month period. He said that would make up the days the city is billing in arrears.

“It’s not an increase in their bill — that is we’re raising rates or changing rates — but people are going to be billed concurrently for water usage and we’re going to slowly tighten that up until they come up to date with the new system,” Gordon said.

Currently, the city bills all 15,000 utility accounts at the end of each month.

“This process creates a number of workflow overloads throughout the month that would be resolved if the city moved to cycle billing,” Bailey said in the memo.

Through the cycle billing system, Bailey said the city “would issue approximately a quarter of the bills at a time for the first four weeks of the month.”

Cycle billing would allow cash flow throughout the month, a reduction in the number of disconnections at any one time and a smoother workload for city employees, the memo states.

“Cycle billing has a number of advantages with only one real disadvantage: change of bill and due dates for three quarters of our customers,” Bailey said.

Due dates — with each quarter of the utility accounts having a different due date — would be the first, the eighth, the 15th and the 22nd of each month, or the next business day after one of those dates.

“Disconnects will be performed the week preceding a cycle’s due date for bills that have gone unpaid for approximately 50 days,” Bailey said in the memo.

To start off, the first two quarters of customers would receive bills near the end of March as well as at the start of April. Those customers would have extended due dates for their March bills, Bailey said.

In addition, those customers would be billed for just one or two weeks of usage, respectively, in April, the memo states.

Other items on the agenda include:

• Consideration of a recommendation from the Bartlesville Development Corporation to provide up to $36,000 from the Economic Development Fund for a water infrastructure extension for a Dollar General Store at U.S. Highway 75 and County Road 3000.

• Possible action to raise the one-way fare for CityRide.

• A presentation and discussion on the city’s budget and revenue projections through the end of the fiscal year.

The meeting is open to the public and will be held in the Council Chambers at City Hall, 401 S. Johnstone Ave., in downtown Bartlesville.

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